The Loved One

In 1965, director Tony Richardson, who had just won the Academy Award for Tom Jones, decided to use his newfound clout by making a film loosely based on Evelyn Waugh's satire of both Hollywood and the funeral industry, The Loved One. Richardson hired Terry Southern, co-writer on Dr Strangelove, to rework an earlier script by Christopher Isherwood; the result was... close to indescribable. If anything, a more scathing indictment of the funeral industry than Waugh's novel (Jessica Mitford, author of The American Way of Death, was a consultant), with wild shifts in tone (the Gielgud scenes and the scenes with, say, Joyboy's mother are only nominally part of the same movie), the film plays like a combination of Dr Strangelove and It's a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World, with a dash of Pink Flamingos thrown in. The film is every bit as scattershot as that description makes it sound; although it's a favorite of mine, it also contains moments that are either disgusting, or simply morbid (the scenes at the animal funeral home were difficult for me to watch; the scenes with Joyboy and his mother are... "indescribable" is almost too mild a word for them.) Not a film I'd recommend for everyone, but much of the film is bracingly tasteless, often hysterically so; at times, the film transcends itself and becomes almost sublime, particularly in many of the cameos by famous stars that were so prevalent in 60s Hollywood comedies.

( For example, Liberace's absolutely stellar turn as a coffin salesman. )

(My apologies for the poor sound in this clip.)

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You, too, can learn to echolocate.

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Anatomy of a pug: the T-shirt.

The fact that I laughed so hard at this almost certainly means I'm a bad person

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